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Note #8427 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

04314
July 14, 2004

Old grievances

Moluccan violence is Christian-Muslim, but that's not all it is

by John Filiatreau

AMBON, Indonesia - On April 25, a rally sponsored by a small group of
Moluccan separatists triggered a riot that left 40 people dead and 2,600
families homeless.

	But there was good news.

	The killing and burning was confined to the city of Ambon. It did not
spread like a wind-driven wildfire through the whole island (also called
Ambon) and then to other islands, as has been the case in many other
outbreaks since 1999.

	In the view of the Rev. I.W.J. Hendriks, the chairman of the Moluccan
Protestant Church (GPM) Synod, that is a welcome sign of a new "maturity" in
the populace.

	The April violence was the first major break in a peace that had
held, with occasional brief but deadly lapses on both sides, since May 2002,
when government-sponsored talks in city of Malino resulted in a cease-fire
and Moluccans of both faiths danced in the streets to celebrate the end of
three years of bloodshed.

	Now, however, Ambon again looks like a bombed-out city;
reconciliation talks have been suspended; and Christians and Muslims are
watching each other warily from strictly segregated neighborhoods.

	The scale of the destruction since the Christian-Muslim war began, in
1999, is almost beyond comprehension: 10,000 people killed, 1,250 public
buildings destroyed, 500,000 Moluccans forced to live as refugees in their
own country.

	Hendriks's GPM has lost more than 235 church buildings, including the
oldest Christian church in Indonesia, built in 1780 in the Ambonese village
of Hila.

	The Indonesian provinces of Maluku and North Maluku are a striking
example of a society that took the path of segregation and followed it to its
end.

	Christians and Muslims live alongside one another but not with one
another. Families, villages, neighborhoods, markets, schools, hospitals,
newspapers, soldiers, police departments, political parties - all come in
Christian and Muslim incarnations. Even in the few villages inhabited by
people of both faiths, Christians and Muslims divide themselves into separate
kampungs (neighborhoods) and are as sensitive about "turf" as American street
gangs.

	 Since April's week-long spasm of violence, it has been unsafe in
Ambon for Christians to walk (or drive, sometimes) through Muslim kampungs,
and vice versa.

	For fear of Muslim snipers, Christians who fly into Ambon don't take
taxis from the airport to the city, but instead hire speedboats that skim
across Ambon Bay at full throttle.

	If a Muslim is stabbed and lies bleeding 30 feet from the front door
of a Christian hospital, he will not be treated there, but will be taken
instead to a Muslim hospital miles away.

	The media invariably characterize the violence in the Malukus as
"Muslim-Christian," and it is that, but that is not all it is.

	Christians in Ambon insist that religion has little or nothing to do
with it. "It's political," Hendriks says. "Religion is only an instrument
that the provocateurs use for political purposes."

	"Outsiders come here and arouse the emotions of the people," agrees
the Roman Catholic archbishop of Ambon, "and the reasons are political. This
is not a war of religions."

	Not that religious conflict is unknown in the Moluccas, one of the
few parts of Indonesia where Christians historically have outnumbered
Muslims. Dutch author Peter J.M. Nas has written that one hallmark of the
Dutch colonial era of the 18th and 19th centuries was "competition between
the two missions, Protestant and Roman Catholic." Two centuries ago, Ambonese
were lamenting that the Catholics' arrival had "led to religious strife and
narrow-minded taunting."

		 Transmigration

	 But a more recent arrival has been more portentous > the
"transmigration" to the Moluccas of more than 200,000 Indonesians from other
parts of this sprawling nation of 15,000 islands.

	Transmigration is part of a government effort to promote
"integration" in Indonesian society by moving people from place to place to
correct "imbalances" - such as the Christians' historic domination of Ambon
and the Moluccas. Since 1975, the government in Jakarta has been moving
people to the Moluccan provinces, which together now have about as many
Muslim residents as Christians.

	The new arrivals in Ambon grew resentful upon learning that the
well-entrenched Christians had all the best jobs sewed up, especially in
civil service and government. Their claims of discrimination eventually led
to an "affirmative action"-style program that gives Muslims an edge in
competition for civil-service jobs (which account for nearly 30 percent of
the provinces' non-agricultural employment). Now it was the Christians' turn
to be resentful.

	Meanwhile, in 1999, when North Maluku was made a separate Indonesian
province (the smallest of 27), the demographic effect was a further
diminution of the historic Christian dominance. The northern province is 70
percent Muslim.

	"Since the independence of Indonesia (1949), the population of Maluku
has significantly increased, especially through the arrival of thousands of
migrants from other parts of Indonesia such as Java and Sulawesi," Nas notes.
"These mainly Muslim migrants are ethnically different from the native
Ambonese, and their arrival is believed to have created tensions between the
communities."

	A former chairman of the GPM Synod, the Rev. Sammy Titaley, has
called the continuing war "a tribal conflict and religious conflict all at
once."

	"It is a religious war since it involves brothers from two religions,
the Muslims and the Christians. ... It also can be called a tribal war ... of
Christian Ambonese against the migrants from Bugis, Buton and Makassar
tribes." (In modern Indonesia, it is easy to forget that these islanders are
a tribal people who through most of their history did not consider themselves
countrymen. In one province, Papua (now called Irian Jaya), the government
has identified more than 300 tribes.)

	Some Christians claim transmigration is part of a government effort
to "Islamicize" Indonesia, where the Muslim-to-Christian ratio is more than 8
to 1. The country, with 180 million Muslim citizens, is the most populous
majority-Islamic nation in the world. Some radicals believe it should be an
Islamic state under Shari'a law, but several campaigns to make it so have not
won the support of moderate Muslims. Religious freedom is protected under the
constitution.

	The U.S. State Department contends that, "while government-sponsored
transmigration of citizens from heavily populated Java, Madura and Bali ...
contributed to the increase in the Muslim population ... there is no evidence
to suggest that creating a Muslim majority in Christian areas was the
objective."

	Sometimes violence is triggered by local issues. In West Kalimantan,
west of the Malukus, violence characterized in the Jakarta press as
"Christian-Muslim" actually was mostly a dispute over forest lands. A battle
on one North Maluku island broke out shortly after gold was discovered there,
and had more to do with mining rights than with religion - although the
combatants soon divided themselves into armies, one Christian and one Muslim.
	Separatists

	Yet another political element often cited as a cause of
Christian-Muslim conflict is a small separatist movement that took part in a
failed revolution in 1950.

	The recent riots broke out after a few dozen independence supporters
in Ambon held a ceremony on April 25 to mark the 54th anniversary of the
founding of the Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS), the Sovereign and Independent
Republic of the South Moluccas. Shortly after it claimed independence,
Indonesia, which had just won its own independence from the Dutch, sent in
troops to rout the revolutionaries, who eventually set up a so-called
"government in exile" in Holland.

	In the April incident, the separatists, nearly all of whom are
Christians, inflamed Muslims by raising the RMS flag in defiance of a police
orders. After the rally, an RMS leader was being escorted to jail when local
Muslims mistook the moving column for an independence parade and reacted to
the supposed provocation by attacking with knives, spears and guns.

	Ambonese Christians are widely regarded as separatists and
separatist-sympathizers - a perception that enables the Muslims to portray
themselves as loyal and patriotic Indonesian nationalists.

	That is one of many widely held but questionable such assumptions.
Christians in the Moluccas are considered pro-Western in general, and
pro-United States in particular. Local police in many areas are believed to
be on the Christians' side. And most Indonesian soldiers are expected to
favor the Muslims. (Christians are well represented in the Indonesian Army,
but promotion to the most senior ranks is limited by a widely acknowledged
"glass ceiling.")

	Ironically, when a group called Laskar Jihad ("holy war troops") was
formed in 2000 to make war on Moluccan Christians, organizers said it was
created in reaction to a conspiracy to turn the Malukus into an independent
Christian nation.

	Christians dismiss that claim as a mere pretext, saying that the
separatist movement is a tiny group of nostalgic ex-freedom fighters with
little popular support who have already separated themselves from Indonesia
by moving en masse to Holland and have little or no support in the United
States.

	Some Christians, however, will admit to fantasizing about
independence. "My wish," one confided in clumsy but correct English, "is that
what will happen in the Moluccas is what happened already in East Timor."

	One indication that there is a link between Christians and the
separatist movement is that Ambon police asked the GPM Synod before the rally
to "advise Christians not to hoist" the RMS flag.

		      Jihadists

	In May 2002, after a similar rally, Laskar Jihad Commander Ustadz
Ja'far Umar Thalib issued a "declaration of war," charging that the
provincial administration and "the Church" had "conspired to carry out an
evil and treasonous plot ... namely that of expelling the Muslim faithful and
then proclaiming the establishment of the RMS state."

	After advising Muslims to "get all the weaponry out," he added:
"Listen, you accomplices of the United States. Listen, you accomplices of the
World Church Council (sic). Listen, you accomplices of Zionist evangelists.
Listen, you Jews and Christians: We Muslims are inviting the U.S. military to
prove its power in Maluku. Let us fight to the finish. ... The second
Afghanistan war will take place in Maluku if you are determined to carry out
the threat, O America."

	Since the violence began, thousands of Muslim fighters from elsewhere
in Indonesia and from other countries including Pakistan and Malaysia have
joined the "jihad" in the Malukus. Most estimates of their number range from
2,000 to 5,000.

	The Indonesian government has confirmed that the Iran-based
Hezbollah, or "Party of God," has sent "warriors" to the Moluccas and has
tried to smuggle arms to Muslims there. It also concedes that some of the
jihadists also have ties to Al Qaeda and to another shadowy Muslim terrorist
group, Jamaah Islamiyah, headquartered in Singapore. But the government has
ignored calls for a concerted effort to remove or control the terror groups.

	Thalib, the Laskar Jihad leader, was arrested in 2001 for inciting
religious hatred and involvement in a death-by-stoning, but was quickly
released on bail and later was acquitted by a Jakarta court.

	The Barnabas Fund, a British Christian charity, has charged that
senior officials in the Indonesian police, military and government support
Laskar Jihad and protect its leaders from prosecution, despite overwhelming
evidence of involvement in mass murder and human-rights abuses.

	According to a U.S. State Department report, "Religious intolerance,
especially on the part of extreme Muslims toward religious minorities,
including Christians ... (has become) a matter of growing concern to many
religious minority members and Muslim moderates" in Indonesia.

		      Massacres

	Each side in the fighting has accused the other of atrocities, in
what has become an unrestrained propaganda war.

	Here's a typical example of the rhetoric, from a Muslim Web site,
IslamicAwakening.com:

	"IMAGINE now a land where Muslims have been brutally murdered by the
thousands. Not only murdered and beheaded ... but afterwards mutilated,
hearts cut out and eaten or pounded to make a gunpowder mix for ammunition!
... IMAGINE women being raped in mosques by savages including priests who
afterwards pass comments like 'the flesh of the Muslimahs were delicious' in
front of their families who await their turn for death. Their breasts cut off
and thrown around like frisbees as they lie in pain awaiting the final blow."

	One important element in the "conflik" is information - too often
including rumors, exaggeration and outright lies. Many massacres have begun
with false reports of the burning of a church or mosque, or a massacre in a
village down the road. In some cases, combatants have burned homes in their
own communities to rouse their neighbors to battle. Every story comes in
Christian and Muslim versions.

	The Protestant and Catholic churches both run "crisis centers" in
Ambon whose principal purpose is to disseminate facts and dispel rumors.

	The Indonesian media have often done more harm than good. Moluccan
Gov. M. Saleh Latuconsina, told Indonesia's National Press Council two years
ago that the nation's media need help in "telling the truth and being
objective."

	"Many national media have run stories that are completely at odds
with the true facts, and they have a tendency to exploit incidents which
could arouse anger in both the Muslim and Christian camps," he said. "... It
is hard to keep things under control in Maluku with so many misleading
reports."

	Ambon has 17 newspapers, each solidly in either the Christian or
Muslim camp.

	Some of the Maluku violence is rooted in centuries-old ethnic
rivalries. When fighting broke out in 1999 between the Muslim village of
Pelauw and the Christian village of Kariu, on the island of Haruku, Muslims
from Pelauw who had moved years before to faraway Ambon nonetheless became
the targets of Christian attacks.

	There is a reflexive tendency for each side to blame the other for
the violence, but the international humanitarian agency Human Rights Watch
(HRW), in its report on the original spate of killings, said, "Neither side
has a monopoly on violence or victims; both sides have endured appalling
losses."

	Many combatants on both sides are "child soldiers," often as young as
12 or 13. These young fighters of both camps have descriptive nicknames. The
Christian youngsters are known as agats, a reference to a tiny insect with a
painful sting; the Protestant boys call themselves linggis, meaning
"crowbars."

	HRW said its study shows "how impossible it may be to sort out the
truth of who was responsible for any incident."

	"It may not matter, in the sense that stopping the conflict now is
more important than sorting out accountability for each link in the chain,"
the organization said. "But ... belief that one party set off an attack
contributes to the determination on the part of the other to preempt another
or avenge the first. The problem is that for virtually every incident, there
are two diametrically opposed versions of what happened."

	It is undisputed that the weaponry on both sides has evolved from
what HRW called "traditional or homemade weapons - machetes, long knives,
spears, arrows shot from slingshots, Molotov cocktails and fishing bombs"
(illegal devices exploded under water to capture fish) - to automatic
weapons, sniper rifles, grenades and shoulder-fired missiles.

	While it is clear that the Christians are losing the war of
attrition, and that Muslim extremist "outsiders" have been responsible for
some of the worst massacres, it's not just a case of Muslims killing
Christians.

	In a list compiled by the Genocide Prevention Center (GPC) of 10
massacres in North Moluku between May 2000 and April 2002, the first two,
allegedly initiated by Christians, were cited among the causes of the other
eight, in all of which Muslims were the attackers and Christians the victims.

	In the first of these massacres, in May 2000, "Christian gangs from
surrounding villages forcefully expelled Muslims from the town of Poso in
retaliation for past hostilities. Over 2,000 houses were destroyed ... and at
least 120 Muslims were confirmed dead within the town. The Christian gangs
subsequently killed another group of unarmed Muslims outside the village.
Casualty estimates were as high as 500 people dead."

	The State Department report, written late in 2000, said, "While in
the past the victims in the Moluccas conflict were equally divided between
Christians and Muslims, most of the estimated 1,200 victims during 2000 were
Christian." That trend has continued, and probably worsened, since then.

	In the north, ethnic conflict is rooted in part in a 500-year-old
struggle for regional supremacy between the cities of Ternate and Tidore. At
the time of the 1999 creation of North Maluku, when both cities hoped to
become the capital of the new province, one result was new tension between
the region's two main ethnic groups: the Muslim Makian and the Christian Kao.

	Violence erupted in November 1999 when a pamphlet was circulated in
both cities calling on Christians - a minority in the area - to rise up in a
holy war against "ignorant" Muslims. The pamphlet ostensibly was signed by
the Titaley, then chairman of the Protestant GPM. He and the church both
disavowed any connection with the provocative document, and it was soon
identified as a fake. By then, however, dozens of people were dead, hundreds
of others were out for revenge, and 15,000 Christians and ethnic Chinese
(most of them also Christians) had been forced to flee to Manado in North
Sulawesi.

	One month before, the largely Christian inhabitants of Kao, on North
Halmahera, had burned down 16 villages belonging to the neighboring (Muslim)
district of Malifut. That dispute began when gold was discovered and the
Christians of Kao saw that the Muslims of Malifut were doing well as laborers
at the mine, which is owned by an Australian-Indonesian partnership.

	In the last week of 1999, Christians in Tobelo, just north of Kao,
killed at least 500 and displaced about 10,000 of the Muslim minority there.

	Australia's New Straits Times reported: "The Muslims were the first
victims of massacre at the hands of the Christian majority in the city of
Kao. Laskar Jihad was created to avenge these deaths."

	It was six months later, in June 2000, in a village near Tobelo, that
Laskar Jihad executed its first organized attack, killing about 200
Christians.

	Titaley acknowledged during a 2001 Synod meeting that Ambonese
Christians share in responsibility for the violence.

	"Sincerity of faith among the Protestants has often been replaced by
explosions of emotion and craving for wrath, which displayed itself in words
and acts very contrary to Christian doctrine," he said in a call to
repentance. "For many people, faith in Christ the Savior all but vanished and
was replaced by brutal craving for revenge, expressed by numerous acts of
violence like killing, burning and destroying other people's property."

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